Not just the winds - Tropical storm & hurricane hazards

It's not just the winds or sideways rain! Let's visit some of the most hazardous impacts of hurricanes and tropical storms.

Hurricanes and tropical storms produce rain bands that spiral outward from the center. Sometimes, turbulence and rotating air in the rainbands can favor tornado-producing storms. While tornadoes embedded within hurricanes are usually weak and short-lived, they are challenging to predict and cause extensive damage.

Tornadoes are most frequent in the leading right quadrant of the storm, where conditions are often most favorable for rotating air.

When dealing with a landfalling hurricane, beaches are our natural buffer between the ocean and inland communities, ecosystems, and natural resources. However, these important environments can suffer extreme and catastrophic changes in response to winds, waves and storm surge during a hurricane.

Seawater will inevitably eat away at loose sand, soils or rocks, putting at-risk infrastructure adjacent to the coast. As a result, beaches are stripped of their sand, asphalt along road cracks and homes could lose their foundations.

A paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Letters studied the erosion impacts Hurricane Maria had on 75 beaches across Puerto Rico in 2017. The results found at Maria caused erosion of 9 to 15 meters along its path, up to 120 feet at particular beaches. That's roughly the length of an Olympic-sized swimming pool!

When a hurricane or tropical storm makes landfall, seawater can push several miles inland, worsening erosion and flooding communities adjacent to the coast, sometimes several dozen feet deep. Storm surge is the abnormal rise in water pushed in above the forecast astronomical tide.

If the cyclone is exceptionally expansive or powerful, storm surge can often go far beyond the coast. For example, Hurricane Ike carried a storm surge more than 28 miles above land from the coast of Texas and Louisiana. As mentioned before, no storm can be treated alike—how far or how high storm surge can get will depend on the terrain, coastline and storm trajectory.